


The Waters of the Moon

by May



Category: Homestuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-15
Updated: 2013-03-15
Packaged: 2017-12-05 10:01:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/721788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/May/pseuds/May
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose helps Sollux in his quest to become enlightened about his mythological role. His greatest weapon is what he already knows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Waters of the Moon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [grassthatchedHut](https://archiveofourown.org/users/grassthatchedHut/gifts).
  * Inspired by [the heart's in the small change](https://archiveofourown.org/works/460729) by [grassthatchedHut](https://archiveofourown.org/users/grassthatchedHut/pseuds/grassthatchedHut). 



> The original story was awesome and this was pretty interesting to write, thank you very much to the requester for the opportunity. :) 
> 
> I would like, also, to say that there is some eye damage in this fic, as well as a battle with tentacles.

With Aradia, Sollux had already gone through the dreambubbles, had slipped through too many gelid, diaphanous surfaces. They were full of those who lingered, who walked between the seams of their memories. Sollux hadn't done that, then, and he wasn't doing that, now. This bubble cut through the meteor - the heavy, solid doors next to the shaking boundaries of a memory of Alternia. 

He gripped the needle between his fingers. The surface of the bubble dipped in and undulated as Sabatraxas pressed against it with a tentacle. He heard its call, dark and insidious. It felt a little like the imminently deceased had, except too broad and jagged to sit there, comfortably. Sollux had lived, as Aradia had done, on the underside of everyone else.

The needle was brittle between his fingers and the rope was tightly knotted around his middle. He left Rose, who was still flatly quiet in that strange human way and moved towards where the emissary was pushing at the bubble. In her bright, blue-veined translucence, she watched him go.

He broke through the surface into the void. It was never as cold as he might have once thought, even against his starship fuel blood. He felt Sabatraxas rather than heard it. There was nothing for sound waves to carry along, there, so its cry moved jagged through his pan and Sollux winced against it.

Rose had assured him that it wasn't invincible, and that it would yield what he wanted. There was a nub of the unknown in his mind, and killing this creature could help rend that apart. A tentacle flailed and brushed against him, wetly. The residue it left was gelid on his skin, making Sollux shiver. It scream was vast and painful, but Sollux's pan didn't turn inside out.

He felt phantom energy thrum along under the surface of his skin. It wasn't really there, but he knew he didn't need it, anyway. It was merely a memory. The operative of the game, after all, was to force you to play in a way that would challenge you. Of course. What would be the point, otherwise?

The gibbering core of its scream told him where it was. Sitting alone on the meteor, he had discussed the shifting of the power of his senses with Terezi, and they had worked out that it was probably just the natural progression of his new blindness. She'd also said, though, that the result of the inevitable could work for him, should he need it.

And, so, he moved towards Sabatraxas. He was sure that, as he got closer, the flagella was shifting air that didn't exist. He raised an arm, brandishing the needle, and caught a claw along his arm for his trouble, leaving a flare of a sting. Sollux tried to imagine where a giant space octopus would sprout a claw and it gave him a reason to count himself lucky for his blindness. He'd once asked Feferi how she could possibly stand to look her lusus in the beak. She'd countered with the fact that she'd find it horrendous to know that people were dying all the time. Sollux had supposed that all trolls had their own mundane horror.

He progressed, regardless. The nothing whipped around him, but the creature keened into his mind in waves. The needle thin in his hands, Sollux tried to locate where the best point of entry was. He was learning through sound, and there should be, he thought, an orb ripe for the impaling.

One of its tentacles whipped past his ear and curled down to whip around his waist. He jerked and struggled, tearing at the slick membrane of its suckers. It tightened around him, and then once or twice more, its fluid soaking through his clothes. Sollux couldn't tell when if there was more than one of them, although he did feel the tip of one wrapping around his head. It emitted no body heat, and cold seeped into his bones and near froze him solid. Sollux twitched, the needle sliding through his fingers. Ichor dripped between his lips, sour on his tongue, and he spat as well as he was able. The tentacles shifted and Sabatraxas gave something that sounded like a sickening coo. It spoke a language, of course, but Sollux could never have understood the words in a million sweeps. Even that light noise prickled unpleasantly inside his pan.

He pulled his hand up through the sopping coils around him, angled his arm as best he could in the tight space, and then pushed the needle forward into the creature's flesh. It was just enough to give it a shock that would force it to release him. It yanked its limb back, pulling Sollux with it, the needle still embedded, the wound seeping viscous blood. Sollux felt himself being hurtled back towards its face, the noise of its shriek searing across his pan. Instead of letting go, he gripped the limb that pulled. His hands were threatening to slide off of the needle and he angled his palm back against it. The tentacle was wetly smooth under his other hand, and he crooked his fingers to dig in his bitten claws.

It didn't give him much purchase, but it gave him enough, and Sollux was able to free the needle from Sabatraxas' flesh. It's screaming died down to a stream of gibbering and burbling. This rolled across his pan, and he knew, then, where the core was, and where tendons spidered out, and that its bulbous eye was just up ahead of him. What bones it had were dark around its center.

With some level direction, Sollux raised the needle and shoved it forward, making the surface of the eye jelly break with a squelch. Sabatraxas screamed and Sollux bowed his head against the noise as it exploded through his pan. As gelatinous fluids ran down his arm, he stabbed the needle inwards until he heard a moist crunch. The creature's howl intensified, expanding within Sollux's head as it was flayed alive from the inside. He resisted the urge to let go and grasp his cranium and, instead, kept fast hold of the needle. As Sabatraxas warbled, he knew that wet skin was parting from bone, that sickly, glistening organs were dissolving into the void. He had the power of that void itself, utilised with a weapon once wielded by the Seer of Light. Rose knew her own role and, perhaps, this way, Sollux would know his.

As its atoms separated, the creature's shrieking died down, leaving a heap of precious few bones, all ancient yellow. He gathered them up, and they were dry in his hands. It was as if Sabatraxas had suddenly been dead for aeons. It had existed in all of eternity at once, after all. Sollux took the bones and entered the dream bubble, once more. The murky river that ran through trickled and burbled at him like a faint recording of the muttering of the horrorterror that he'd just killed. It coursed naturally, though, and Sollux's pan began to settle itself. He dropped the bones where the sound of the rushing was strongest and let them go where they wanted to. Of course, one slipped down the stream, and it was this one that he had to take.

He held it as the hours passed. There wasn't really night and day in the bubbles as there had been on Alternia, but Sollux could wait for when night would be. A voice that sounded a lot like his, reverberating in a tortured cry. Sollux remembered it, but had thought it was his own, fate playing a cruel joke on him. Now that he wasn't dying, he heard the nuance of the voice. It was older, more weary, more desperate. It was the voice of one stretched beyond his existence. The eye of Sollux's mind saw hands in biowires and nodes hooked into temples. His old understanding. At six sweeps, however, this had sat distant and blurred on the horizon.

After that, there was a soulless clank. The strange, uncanny Aradia that was blueblooded and not like the girl he knew. There were so many of this Aradia around that he wasn't sure if she was part of the ritual or just passing through. He rationed that since it was made for him, there was no reason why she wouldn't be. He felt her synthetic glass sight and he pulled the guilt back and rolled it around his pan. He allowed himself to consider that Rose should know what he'd done. He let it bloom and then it dissipated.

Feferi cloaked in her wreath of hair, the hole still through her middle and her exquisite tyrian blood. He heard the sound of her voice and felt the cool brush of her hand against his cheek. She says that she would take care of him, she would make sure he was okay. They had once fumbled in the dark and he had pictured, then, her fingers across the controls of the ship he might have piloted for her.

He knew that these weren't the normal, white-eyed ghosts. They were only his ghosts, with all of their unhealed wounds. Sollux gripped the bone, and waited through to when he knew the next night would be.

At that point, the bubble shifted around him, subtly. A dreambubble would do that, anyway, but this happened right at the moment he waited for. He was back on Alternia, the earth underneath him blackened. It was no memory of his, he knew, because this world was dead. Living on Alternia had meant a constantly revolving state of the dead leaving and the living arriving. All Sollux could do, then, was sit in this tomb and listen to those dead writhing and whispering to him. Aradia used to tell him what they said to her and, when they were small, they would play a game where she would try and guess which of the voices he had heard were of the voices that she heard.

Now, he wondered if this is what they sounded like to her. Sour, pointed little whispers told him of what they knew, now that they were dead. They spoke the language of the doomed, and the insects that ate the flesh of these dead children spoke of inevitability. When Sollux gripped the bone, it was solid and unsplintering.

The nub in his pan was eroding and he knew, now, that he and Rose were on different sides of the same door. It wasn't just that they both should understand their role, as all players should, but that the very essence of their roles was in the understanding.

On what would be the third night, there was a test. Running his thumb over the tip of the bone, Sollux looked this very challenge in the eye. Perhaps a thousand times more frightening than the horrorterrors, he needed not to turn back from it. Knowing and using was how he attained victory.

In the end, Sollux came back dripping with ichor, the bone of Sabatraxas tucked into his pocket. He could say, then, that he could command. He felt Rose's soft hand slip into his, even with it still slick and crusted with organic horrorterror gelatin. In the here and now, she wasn't a ghost, and he was glad to see her.

He pulled the remains of Sabatraxas from his pocket and smiled, showing her the gaps in his gums. 


End file.
